Currently physically on my bedtable: Frank McCourt,
Angela's Ashes
I'd read it before but not owned it, and this time I left it behind in Florida for my mother-in-law to read. Actually I figure RDC's sister will read it first--she reads more (since she doesn't work either at home or abroad).
My favorite line is something about with his father wanting him to die for Ireland and the priest wanting him to die for the Faith, he wonders if there's anyone who wants him to live at all, at all.
And I find after reading it that a bit of a lilt appears on my tongue. I like
that.
3 January 2000 (which counts as fall of 1999 because I was still on Christmas
vacation)
Frank
McCourt, Tis
I asked my father for this for Christmas and I was pretty sure it'd be a sure bet. My sister gave Angela's Ashes to him a couple of Christmases ago, which surprised me as it's not his usual thing. But it is about Limerick, whence his grandfather came, and the mistrust of the North of Ireland and of hair that looks Presbyterian.
Anyway, this picks up where Angela's Ashes leaves off, and it had transcendent moments like when he figured out how to teach so his students would learn, and conversations with his mother, but overall because it was about a man not a boy I didn't like it so well. Plus it didn't induce a lilt in me. So I wonder if he Americanized his speech patterns, since it's set here and everyone abused his brogue anyway. Or, which is more likely, he Gaelickized his speech patterns for Angela's Ashes so that that's what I expected to continue.
Both excellent, of course, but the titles are reversed.
1 January 2000
Gregory
Maguire, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister
Not as good as Wicked, but still very good. I particularly liked how
he set the tale in real-life Holland and how well to my novice's eye he described
the techniques of painting and what can be conveyed how through a canvas.
30 December 1999
Unknown,
something like 80369: Survivor of Mengele
Horrendously bad, and I say despite my guilt at never having endured what he
endured, never having been Jewish or African-American or with any ethnic memory
of the mistreatment of the Irish. I assume his was a quite low number for him
to surive to the end, but having survived, sterile or not, he should have insisted
someone copyedit the author's work. (He wasn't the author; if he were I'd feel
guiltier yet for ranking on it.)
29 December 1999
Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma
I love his metaphors: after a tragedy (it gives away nothing to say one of
them went into a coma): "[None] of us slept that Sunday night. Instead,
we made an electronic cat's cradle of phone calls between each other's houses,
all of us wearing house roes, hunched over kitchen chairs with only stove lights
burning, whispering, unknowingly mimicking the purgtorial hiss of Karen's respirator."
I just noticing the dangling participle that implies the stove lights were whispering,
but houses do make noise in the depth of the night, stovelights no less than
anything, and still the electronic cat's cradle is perfect.
26 December 1999
Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm
In the cinematization with Kate Beckinsale that I also thoroughly enjoyed,
Stephen Fry's character quotes Jane Austen at the end and I was hoping that
character would do so in the book as well, and several people do quote old Janey
[maybe I should call her old Janey as Holden does his former checkers opponent?]
but never a passage I couldn't place, unlike the passage in the movie. Now I'll
have to rent it instead of watching it on A&E so I can run that damn passage
through a concordance if I have to. Nobody quotes Jane without my nosing it
out.
23 December 1999
Beverly
Cleary, Ramona's World
Cleary, unlike Madeliene L'Engle, has not lost her touch for children's lit
and renders her setting contemporary much more skillfully than L'Engle recently
has.
21 December 1999
Edward
Eager, Magic by the Lake, Knight's Castle, The Well-Wishers, and
Magic or Not?
I love Half-Magic and Seven-Day Magic and I don't remember Magic
or Not. I picked up Betsy Was a Junior yesterday (9 December 1999)
and was just going to sit in the children's room and read for a spell when I
saw the Eagers at the top of a shelf (instead of at the bottom of a shelf, like
the book in Seven-Day Magic). I'm concerned that I don't have all the
books with me such that I can't ensure I read them in order. In fact I know
I haven't, because I read Magic by the Lake on the bus and at lunch today
and it features children from an obviously other Eager book, whom I have just
discovered are the kids in Knight's Castle, which I started on the bus
home. I am going to trust that my peanut intellect and stubbon lugubriousness
can cope with the horror of reading books out of order, especially when Knight's
Castle, set later in Half-Magic's time, was written before Magic
on the Lake, which is set three weeks after Half-Magic closes.
991217
John Fowles,
A Maggot
My first Fowles. On my reading list for a long long time was The Magus so when I found A Maggot in the 'brary I was much embarrassed that I couldn't get the title right. Of course, Fowles wrote both titles. Its blurb calls A Maggot partly sf, and I guess it is, if I follow the interrogation aright. A lot of what to the 18th century characters seems bewitchment or enchantment is clearly to the 20th century reader a television, a spaceship, or the sf equivalent thereof. What I don't get is why Fowles relates, by a far reach, the main events of his tale with Ann Lee and Shakerism. If I need a reader's guide to Fowles I'll never get through Nabokov.
Maud Hart Lovelace,
Betsy Was a Junior
This, the seventh, was the first of the series to do all the tedious backstory
that marks an author at the end of her rope. Or ropes, if several authors. The
explaining in The Babysitters' Club and the Sweet Valley High
books is as off-putting as the vapid goody-goody narrative. Not that I regret
borrowing this book through Interlibrary loan. Thank you, kind folk of Vernon,
Iowa, for lending me your book.
991209
Franco Ferrucci,
The Life of God as Told by Himself
More of LIM's convergences: I have been peeved at Dante since I read in Forbidden Knowledge and remembered that ol' Dante shoved Odysseus into his inferno sought too much knowledge, according to Shattuck's reading of Dante. Now in The Life of God:
Later I told him the story of Odysseus, meaning to hold up the Greek hero for Dante's admiration. I told him that, after returning to his faithful Penelope, Odysseus had once again departed, this time to see the world that lay beyond the columns that Heracles raised in Gibraltar to prevent man from venturing beyond. I was trying to make him see that this was an example thta should be emulated; people ought to consider carefully the true essence of their nature and follow their yearning for knowledge. Dante became excited over my story and rushed off to write his version, in which I punished Odysseus because of his excessive daring as a navigator. According to Dante, I caused Odysseus to sink into the sea at the very moment when new land was sighted. Poor Odysseus was added to the phalanx of those damned in hell, and thus was extinguished my attempt to educate Dante in pagan values.
What I like about Ferrucci is that his God is always disappointed in how humans
misinterpret him. And that God is forgetful. What a great opening line: "For
long stretches at a time I forget that I am God. But then, memory isn't my strong
suit. It comes and goes with a will of its own."
7-20 November 1999
It's Like
This, Cat
A Newbery. Like The Door in the Wall, a winner more because it was
topical than because of the book's extraordindary merit. In my opinion.
19 November 1999
Wouldn't the world be better had Hitler never been born? Maybe not. Fry offers
us one that's worse, in large part because there was still a vacuum in post-Versailles
Germany waiting for someone, Hitler or no, to fill it.
Fry keeps a better handle on this than on the simpler plot of The Hippopotamus.
He comes up with ideas ffor a world without a second World War, major
and minor: without the Holocaust, would the U.S. and the rest of the world have
learned racial tolerance? and without WWII, Philip K. Dick's The Man in the
High Castle would never have been written, and so the author would have
remained unknown, and thus the movie "Total Recall" would never have
been made from another of his novels. And rock-and-roll didn't happen either.
There were passages that resonated with Forbidden Knowledge. "[T]he
fact that science can't explain why Mozart could do what he did, that doesn't
disqualify us from speculating on the composition of liver cells, does it?"
That is, we don't understand everything we know, but still we quest for more
knowledge. A historian (who studies Hitler) argues with a physicist: "Everything's
morally neutral in your universe, yet a child of two can tell you nothing is
morally neutral." An Amazon reviewer thinks Shattuck calls for limits on
knowledge; I don't think that's what he wants. He recognizes, as does this historian,
that "[r]eal problems aren't number-shaped [objective "pure"
information], they're people-shaped [subjective, moral use of information: knowledge]."
Begun November 1, 1999; finished 6 November 1999
Maud Hart Lovelace,
Betsy-Tacy; Betsy, Tacy, & Tib; Betsy and Tacy Go over the Big Hill,
Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, Heaven to Betsy, Betsy in Spite of Herself
Delightful. I wish I had grown up with them. I think Lois Lenski or someone
with a similar pen-and-ink style might have illustrated the first editions of
Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, before Garth Williams's more comfortable sketches.
Begun 29 October 1999; finished 1 November 1999
Roger Shattuck,
Forbidden Knowledge
Coherent reaction pending. Reaction certainly; coherency possible.
Roger Shattuck quotes the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. picking out "as one of the great errors in history the interpretation of power and love as polar opposite and the association of power with violence. King cut to the core of the matter with a no-nonsense simplification:
It was this misinterpretation that cause Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of hte will to power, to reject the Christian concept of lvoe. It was this same misinterpreation which induced Christian theologists to reject Nietzschean philosophy of hte will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love. Now, we've got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice."
Or maybe it was another passage of Shattuck that reminded me of Ayn Rand's characters (since I know them like I know my right thumbnail). He quotes Plato in Theatetus:
...the story about the Thracian maidservant who exercised her wit at the expense of Thales, when he was looking up to study the stars and tumbled down a well. She scoffed at him for being so eager to know what was happening in the sky that he could not see what lay at his feet.
My marginalia: Rand's characters ignore their feet because they can trample
everything, because a well would sooner seal itself off than extract from itself
one spark of evil that might annoy a character's finger. Apologies to Shakespeare
there.
The unexamined life might not be worth living, but the overexamined life will
put you down a well and rightly so.
This book had me running for a dictionary more than anything since I read
Dr. Dolittle in first grade:
I never kippled* much as a child. My favorite bit in the whole book was in
the beginning, when Shattuck mentions the Elephant's Child of the Just So story
that explains the origins of the elephant's trunk. The Elephant's Child (whom
I first met as Rob Austin's toy in Meet the Austins) malaprops "insatiable
curiosity" (which his elders tell him he should curb) to "'satiable
curtiosity" (he is a polite pachyderm).
* This is an old cartoon. A young couple is sitting under a tree. One asks,
"Do you like Kipling much?" and the other answers, "I don't know.
I've never kippled."
Started early October 1999. Finished 30 November 1999.
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